Question: Do you find your work challenging?

Jon Copley answered on 22 Jun 2010:

Definitely – and that’s also what makes it satisfying.

It can be frustrating at times – in my work, the challenges are first to raise the funding for the research, and particularly for our expeditions (we have to find the funding to take a ship of fifty people to sea for a couple of months). And then at sea, there are often technical problems with our equipment – even if it’s been checked very carefully before you left, something unexpected always happens. And the weather can be a problem too – sometimes it’s so rough that we can’t launch our underwater vehicles, so we just have to wait until it calms down.

But perhaps unlike other areas of science, once we’ve got to the bottom of the ocean, in some ways our science is easy – because no-one has been there before, just finding out what is down there is how we can make discoveries. So we don’t have to do that much complicated lab work to make new discoveries (there’s some lab work to analyse what we find, but it’s not as complicated as in some other areas of science).

My wife likes to tease me that my science is “easy” because of that (she used to do complicated lab experiments to find out how fruit fly embryos develop!), and in a sense she’s right – but the challenge for us is getting to the bottom of the ocean in the first place, rather than what we do afterwards.

Still, it’s a great feeling when an expedition that you’ve been planning for a couple of years finally starts, and at last you’re aboard the ship, and you realise that the ship is “yours” – it will go where you decide!

And the biggest challenge of all is that there is so much ocean out there left to explore – and from what we’ve found so far, there are certainly lots more surprises waiting for us that will change the way we think about how our planet works, and the life on it. But even if I spent all my time at sea, it would take many, many lifetimes to explore it all.